Posts in the Personal Category

It was the morning of Tuesday, May 7th and I was sitting in the Ambroisie conference room of the CNIT in Paris, France having my mind repeatedly blown by an up-and-coming web technology called “Cascading Style Sheets”, 25 years ago this month.

I’d been the Webmaster at Case Western Reserve University for just over two years at that point, and although I was aware of table-driven layout, I’d resisted using it for the main campus site.  All those table tags just felt… wrong.  Icky.  And yet, I could readily see how not using tables hampered my layout options.  I’d been holding out for something better, but increasingly unsure how much longer I could wait.

Having successfully talked the university into paying my way to Paris to attend WWW5, partly by having a paper accepted for presentation, I was now sitting in the W3C track of the conference, seeing examples of CSS working in a browser, and it just felt… right.  When I saw a single word turned a rich blue and 100-point size with just a single element and a few simple rules, I was utterly hooked.  I still remember the buzzing tingle of excitement that encircled my head as I felt like I was seeing a real shift in the web’s power, a major leap forward, and exactly what I’d been holding out for.

Looking back at my hand-written notes (laptops were heavy, bulky, battery-poor, and expensive in those days, so I didn’t bother taking one with me) from the conference, which I still have, I find a lot that interests me.  HTTP 1.1 and HTML 3.2 were announced, or at least explained in detail, at that conference.  I took several notes on the brand-new <OBJECT> element and wrote “CENTER is in!”, which I think was an expression of excitement.  Ah, to be so young and foolish again.

There are other tidbits: a claim that “standards will trail innovation” — something that I feel has really only happened in the past decade or so — and that “Math has moved to ActiveMath”, the latter of which is a term I freely admit I not only forgot, but still can’t recall in any way whatsoever.

But I did record that CSS had about 35 properties, and that you could associate it with markup using <LINK REL=STYLESHEET>, <STYLE>…</STYLE>, or <H1 STYLE="…">.  There’s a question — “Gradient backgrounds?” — that I can’t remember any longer if it was a note to myself to check later, or something that was floated as a possibility during the talk.  I did take notes on image backgrounds, text spacing, indents (which I managed to misspell), and more.

What I didn’t know at the time was that CSS was still largely vaporware.  Implementations were coming, sure, but the demos I’d seen were very narrowly chosen and browser support was minimal at best, not to mention wildly inconsistent.  I didn’t discover any of this until I got back home and started experimenting with the language.  With a printed copy of the CSS1 specification next to me, I kept trying things that seemed like they should work, and they didn’t.  It didn’t matter if I was using the market-dominating behemoth that was Netscape Navigator or the scrappy, fringe-niche new kid Internet Explorer: very little seemed to line up with the specification, and almost nothing worked consistently across the browsers.

So I started creating little test pages, tackling a single property on each page with one test per value (or value type), each just a simple assertion of what should be rendered along with a copy of the CSS used on the page.  Over time, my completionist streak drove me to expand this smattering of tests to cover everything in CSS1, and the perfectionist in me put in the effort to make it easy to navigate.  That way, when a new browser version came out, I could run it through the whole suite of tests and see what had changed and make note of it.

Eventually, those tests became the CSS1 Test Suite, and the way it looks today is pretty much how I built it.  Some tests were expanded, revised, and added, plus it eventually all got poured into a basic test harness that I think someone else wrote, but most of the tests — and the overall visual design — were my work, color-blindness insensitivity and all.  Those tests are basically what got me into the Working Group as an Invited Expert, way back in the day.

Before that happened, though, with all those tests in hand, I was able to compile CSS browser support information into a big color-coded table, which I published on the CWRU web site (remember, I was Webmaster) and made freely available to all.  The support data was stored in a large FileMaker Pro database, with custom dropdown fields to enter the Y/N/P/B values and lots of fields for me to enter template fragments so that I could export to HTML.  That support chart eventually migrated to the late Web Review, where it came to be known as “the Mastergrid”, a term I find funny in retrospect because grid layout was still two decades in the future, and anyway, it was just a large and heavily styled data table.  Because I wasn’t against tables for tabular data.  I just didn’t like the idea of using them solely for layout purposes.

You can see one of the later versions of Mastergrid in the Wayback Machine, with its heavily classed and yet still endearingly clumsy markup.  My work maintaining the Mastergrid, and articles I wrote for Web Review, led to my first book for O’Reilly (currently in its fourth edition), which led to my being asked to write other books and speak at conferences, which led to my deciding to co-found a conference… and a number of other things besides.

And it all kicked off 25 years ago this month in a conference room in Paris, May 7th, 1996.  What a journey it’s been.  I wonder now, in the latter half of my life, what CSS — what the web itself — will look like in another 25 years.

• 25 Years of CSS was published on Tuesday, May 25th, 2021.
• It was assigned to the CSS, History, and Standards categories.
• There have been twelve replies.

Today marks one month at Igalia.  It’s been a lot, and there’s more to come, but it’s been a really great experience.  I get to do things I really enjoy and value, and Igalia supports and encourages all of it without trying to steer me in specific directions.  I’ve been incredibly lucky to experience that kind of working environment twice in my life — and the other one was an outfit I helped create.

Here’s a summary of what I’ve been up to:

• Generally got up to speed on what Igalia is working on (spoiler: a lot).
• Redesigned parts of wpewebkit.org, fixed a few outstanding bugs, edited most of the rest. (The site runs on 11ty, so I’ve been learning that as well.)
• Wrote a bunch of CSS tests/demos that will form the basis for other works, like articles and videos.
• Drafted a few of said articles.  As I write this, two are very close to being complete, and a third is almost ready for editing.
• Edited some pages on the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN), clarifying or upgrading text in some places and replacing unclear examples in others.
• Joined the Open Web Docs Steering Committee.
• Reviewed various specs and proposals (e.g., Miriam’s very interesting @scope proposal).

And that’s not all!  Here’s what I have planned for the next few months:

• More contributions to MDN, much of it in the CSS space, but also branching out into documenting some up-and-coming APIs in areas that are fairly new to me.  (Details to come!)
• Contributions to the Web Platform Tests (WPT), once I get familiar with how that process is structured.
• Articles on topics that will include (but are not limited to!) gaps in CSS, logical properties, and styling based on writing direction.  I haven’t actually settled on outlets for those yet, so if you’d be interested in publishing any of them, hit me up.  I usually aim for about a thousand words, including example markup and CSS.
• Very likely will rejoin the CSS Working Group after a (mumblecough)-year absence.
• Assembling a Raspberry Pi system to test out WPEWebKit in its native, embedded environment and get a handle on how to create a “setting up WPEWebKit for total embedded-device noobs”, of which I am one.

That last one will be an entirely new area for me, as I’ve never really worked with an embedded-device browser before.  WPEWebKit is a WebKit port, actually the official WebKit port for embedded devices, and as such is aggressively tuned for performance and low resource demand.  I’m really looking forward to not only seeing what it’s like to use it, but also how I might be able to leverage it into some interesting projects.

WPEWebKit is one of the reasons why Igalia is such a big contributor to WebKit, helping drive its standards support forward and raise its interoperability with other browser engines.  There’s a thread of self-interest there: a better WebKit means a better WPEWebKit, which means more capable embedded devices for Igalia’s clients.  But after a month on the inside, I feel comfortable saying most of Igalia’s commitment to interoperability is philosophical in nature — they truly believe that more consistency and capability in web browsers benefits everyone.  As in, THIS IS FOR EVERYONE.

And to go along with that, more knowledge and awareness is seen as an unvarnished good, which is why they’re having me working on MDN content.  To that end, I’m putting out an invitation here and now: if you come across a page on MDN about CSS or HTML that confuses you, or seems inaccurate, or just doesn’t have much information at all, please get in touch to let me know, particularly if you are not a native English speaker.

I can’t offer translation services, unfortunately, but I can do my best to make the English content of MDN as clear as possible.  Sometimes, what makes sense to a native English speaker is obscure or unclear to others.  So while this offer is open to everyone, don’t hold back if you’re struggling to parse the English.  It’s more likely the English is unclear and imprecise, and I’d like to erase that barrier if I can.

The best way to submit a report is to send me email with [MDN] and the URL of the page you’re writing about in the subject line.  If you’re writing about a collection of pages, put the URLs into the email body rather than the subject line, but please keep the [MDN] in the subject so I can track it more easily.  You can also ping me on Twitter, though I’ll probably ask you to email me so I don’t lose track of the report.  Just FYI.

I feel like there was more, but this is getting long enough and anyway, it already seems like a lot.  I can’t wait to share more with you in the coming months!

• First Month at Igalia was published on Monday, March 15th, 2021.
• It was assigned to the Standards and Work categories.
• There have been no replies.

The first week on the job at Igalia was… it was good, y’all.  Upon formally joining the Support Team, got myself oriented, built a series of tests-slash-demos that will be making their way into some forthcoming posts and videos, and forked a copy of the Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) so I can start making edits and pushing them to the public site.  In fact, the first of those edits landed Sunday night!  And there was the usual setting up accounts and figuring out internal processes and all that stuff.

To be perfectly honest, a lot of my first-week momentum was provided by the rest of the Support Team, and setting expectations during the interview process.  You see, at one point in the past I had a position like this, and I had problems meeting expectations.  This was partly due to my inexperience working in that sort of setting, but also partly due to a lack of clear communication about expectations.  Which I know because I thought I was doing well in meeting them, and then was told otherwise in evaluations.

So when I was first talking with the folks at Igalia, I shared that experience.  Even though I knew Igalia has a different approach to management and evaluation, I told them repeatedly, “If I take this job, I want you to point me in a direction.”  They’ve done exactly that, and it’s been great.  Special thanks to Brian Kardell in this regard.

I’m already looking forward to what we’re going to do with the demos I built and am still refining, and to making more MDN edits, including some upgrades to code examples.  And I’ll have more to say about MDN editing soon.  Stay tuned!

• First Week at Igalia was published on Monday, February 22nd, 2021.
• It was assigned to the Projects, Standards, and Work categories.
• There has been one reply.

Today is my first day as a full-time employee at Igalia, where I’ll be doing a whole lot of things I love to do: document and explain web standards at MDN and other places, participate in standards work at the W3C, take on some webmaster duties, and play a part in planning Igalia’s strategy with respect to advancing the web.  And likely other things!

I’ll be honest, this is a pretty big change for me.  I haven’t worked for anyone other than myself since 2003.  But the last time I did work for someone else, it was for Netscape (slash AOL slash Time Warner) as a Standards Evangelist, a role I very much enjoyed.  In many ways, I’m taking that role back up at Igalia, in a company whose values and structure are much more in line with my own.  I’m really looking forward to finding out what we can do together.

If the name Igalia doesn’t ring any bells, don’t worry: nobody outside the field has heard of them, and most people inside the field haven’t either.  So, remember when CSS Grid came to browsers back in 2017?  Igalia did the implementation that landed in Safari and Chromium.  They’ve done a lot of other things besides that — some of which I’ll be helping to spread the word about — but it’s the thing that web folks will be most likely to recognize.

This being my first day and all, I’m still deep in the setting up of logins and filling out of forms and general orienting of oneself to a new team and set of opportunities to make a positive difference, so there isn’t much more to say besides I’m stoked and planning to say more a little further down the road.  For now, onward!

• First Day at Igalia was published on Monday, February 15th, 2021.
• It was assigned to the Standards and Work categories.
• There have been thirteen replies.

We had been awake since one in the morning.  She had been unconscious since three in the morning.

We’d been taking turns sleeping with Rebecca in the nights leading up to that day, six years ago today, and on the final night it had been my turn.  I was woken by a sound, from her or by her I still don’t know, and I saw that she was awake.  And had vomited.  And still could barely move.  And I knew this was it.

Kat called the hospice nurse to come and give her the drugs to take away the pain, and we waited, sick with despair and doing everything we could not to show it.

We gently held her as she trembled.  We kissed her head through her curly hair, told her that we were here with her and that she could go, not to be afraid, we’d be there with her soon.  Lying to her, now, finally, so far past the point where truth was kind or helpful, telling her whatever we thought would take away even a tiny slice of the fear.  Shamelessly, literally shamelessly, weaponizing all the trust we had built up over the years by telling her the truth her whole life, to ease, if we could, the last hours of it.

Her eyes were wide, even for her.  They barely blinked.  We could still catch her attention, but it was so much harder now.  The trembling increased, and then, eyes somehow still wider, she started to claw frantically at her temples, trying to dig out the thing that was killing her.  Or just to somehow relieve the pain.

I had to restrain her, catch her small wrists in my hands, wrap my arms around her arms and shaking small body and brokenly tell her no, stop, I know, I know, I’m so sorry, we want it to stop too, I know, we love you.

The nurse was finally there and administered a lot of narcotics.  Not enough to kill her outright, but enough to take away the pain.  And consciousness.  I almost asked him to double the dose, or triple it, whatever was necessary to end things quickly and painlessly.  I stopped only because I realized the position that would put him in.  And that if it were an option, he’d already have offered it.

Waiting for the drugs to work, we read her her favorite stories, holding books up one at a time and asking if she wanted this one, this one, this one.  Her head would jerk in a prototype of a nod, and we’d open that book and read, taking turns, voices somehow as clear and steady as if we were doing normal bedtime stories.  I made a list as we went, because I knew I’d want to know later.

1. Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel
2. How the Sun Was Brought Back to the Sky
3. Madeline
4. Jump Rope Magic

Halfway through that last, the drugs finally took hold, and she slipped into unconsciousness.

Or really, semi-consciousness: some part of her was still aware of her surroundings.  Every time Kat shifted or drew away for a moment, Rebecca would whimper quietly, and only stop when she could hear and feel Kat reassuring her.  She only did so for me when I got up from the bed entirely.  I would assure her that I would be back in a minute or two, that I wasn’t going away for good.  That was enough to quiet her.  She trusted us so much.

Shortly before dawn, we started sending texts to loved ones.  This is it.  If you want to say goodbye, you need to come today.  She has hours left.  And asked them to spread the word, so others would know to come.

Just after dawn, at 7:22 in the morning, she crossed another threshold.

Happy birthday, Rebecca, we told her with quietly trembling voices.  You made it.  You really did.  You’re a great big six year old now.  We love you so much.

There was no response.

So many people came to see her one last time on her sixth birthday, drifted in and out of her room, a slowly shifting cast of characters supporting her, us, each other, themselves.  I don’t really remember how it felt then, barely remember who was there and who was not, but looking back now it’s like those movie scenes where one person is still, sharply in focus, while long-exposure blurs of people moving around them draw a contrast between what matters and what is incidental, between transience and permanence.

Sometimes, what is still is the most transient of all.

By late afternoon, there were signs the drugs weren’t enough, that she was going to start seizing despite everything.  Which in turn meant there was a risk she’d come back to a consciousness filled with nothing but incomprehensible pain.  We weren’t sure what we could do.  She’d been lying on her back all day, so nearly motionless, body flaring with fever, shallow breaths coming and going in a rhythm I kept falling into, the way you do when your child is in distress.

Kat looked across at me and said, She’s a side sleeper.

We rolled Rebecca onto her sleeping side, her right side, and her breath hitched, drew in slowly, and then flowed out deeply, contentedly.  Her breathing stayed slow and deep, the rhythm of sleep, comforting, except it gradually got slower and slower and slower.  Stretched out more and more over half an hour, eventually slow enough that when it stopped altogether, we almost didn’t notice.

We checked for pulse.  Breath.  Pulse again.  Nothing.  For a minute.  Two.

A sound came from my throat that I know now is the true sound of ultimate suffering — and as if startled by it, she drew in another breath, choking me off.

We begged her to stop fighting, told her it was okay to go, we loved her, we loved her, we loved her.

A few minutes later, pulse and breath stopped again.  And Rebecca was gone forever.

Rebecca, who we knew so well.

Rebecca, who we had barely gotten to know.

Rebecca, who we will never get to know.

Time has moved on, as we have, and yet some parts of us have not.  Some parts of us are caught there, six years ago today, able to do nothing but watch her slowly slip away, literally helpless to do anything except try to soothe her through the haze of drugs and thickening darkness with our words, our touch, our presence, our love.  Parts of us frozen in that passage, unchanging.

Like Rebecca is now, forever, and should not be.

When I was One, I had just begun. When I was Two, I was nearly new. When I was Three I was hardly me. When I was Four, I was not much more. When I was Five, I was just alive. But now I am Six, I’m as clever as clever, So I think I’ll be six now for ever and ever.

 — ‘Now We Are Six’, A.A. Milne

• Forever and Ever was published on Sunday, June 7th, 2020.
• It was assigned to the Personal and Rebecca categories.
• There have been thirty-six replies.

I ended my observance of CSS Naked Day 2020 by launching an entirely new design for meyerweb.  I’m calling it Hamonshū after the source from which I adapted most of the graphic elements.  I’ve been working on it sporadically in my free time since mid-January, finally coming to a place I thought was ready to launch in late March.

Naked Day was a convenient way to change over the structure of pages while there was no design, which probably makes it sound like that’s the only reason I even observed it.  To the contrary, I hadn’t planned to launch the new design until June 8th of this year — but once I decided on going style-naked, I realized it was the perfect opportunity to make the switch.

I might still have delayed, if not for everything happening in the world right now.  But Cameron Moll said it best as he recently launched a new design: “Deploying in the middle of a pandemic seems so unimportant at the moment. Or maybe there’s no better time for it.”  That last sentence resonated with me unexpectedly deeply, and came to mind again as I took the CSS away for Naked Day.

I’ll have quite a few things to say about the design in the future: things I learned, techniques I used, bits I really like, that sort of thing.  In this post, I want to say a bit about its genesis.

It all started when someone — I’ve since lost track of who, or even where it happened — brought my attention to Hamonshū, Vols. 1-3, available on the Internet Archive thanks to the Smithsonian Institution.  Hamonshū, a word which I understand roughly translates into English as “wave forms” or “wave design”, is a three-volume set of art studies of water.  Created by Yūzan Mori and published in 1903, I had never heard of it before, but the sketches immediately appealed to me.  You can get an preview of some of Yūzan’s art in this article from Public Domain Review, or just go to the source (linked previously, as well as in the footer of the site) and immerse yourself in it.

As I absorbed Yūzan’s ink studies of ocean waves, rivers, fountains, and more, the elements of a design began to form in my head.  I won’t say I saw it — being aphantasic, I couldn’t — but certain sketches suggested themselves as components of a layout, and stuck with me.

Early on, I had thought to combine elements from Hamonshū with other artwork, primarily ink landscape paintings from the Qing Dynasty and Edo periods: two such examples being Tall Bamboo and Distant Mountains, after Wang Meng (Wang Hui 王翬, 1694) and View of West Lake (Ike Taiga, 1700s).  I made attempts, but the elements never really combined properly.  I eventually realized I was trying to combine close-up studies of water with adaptations of much larger works, and the scale of the brush strokes was clashing.  At that point, I abandoned the paintings and concentrated exclusively on Hamonshū.

As the various design elements came together, I went looking for fonts to use.  I originally thought to use variable fonts, but I kept coming back to IM Fell, a typeface I’d seen Simon St. Laurent use and had put to my own purposes in an experimental typeset of Neal Stephenson’s Mother Earth Mother Board.  IM Fell has a sort of nautical feel to it, at least to me, which fit nicely with the water elements I was adapting from Hamonshū, so I ended up using it as a “site elements” typeface.  It’s what’s used for the site name in the header, the main navigation links, metadata for posts, sidebar heading text, the h1 on most pages, and so on.

Originally I used IM Fell for the titles of blog posts like this one, but it didn’t feel quite right.  I think it caused the titles to blend into the rest of the design a little too much unless I kept it relatively huge.  I needed something that felt consistent, but distinguished itself at the smaller sizes I needed for post titles.  I went back to Google Fonts and scrolled through the choices until I narrowed down to a few faces, of which Eczar was the eventual winner.  In addition to using Eczar for post titles, I also employ it in the site’s footer, at least wherever IM Fell isn’t used.  The general body copy of the site is Georgia Pro, falling back to Georgia or a generic serif as needed.

One of the limitations I set for myself was to be reasonably lightweight, and that was a major part of the process.  The details merit a post or two of their own, but my overall goal was to get even the post archive pages under a megabyte in total.  I’m pleased to say I was able to get there, for the most part.  As an example, the main post archive page is, as I write this (but before I posted it) 910.98KB, and that includes the various photographs and other images embedded in posts.  The time to DOMContentLoaded over WiFi is consistently below 200ms, 400-500ms on “Regular 3G”, and 500-600ms on “Regular 2G”, all with the local cache disabled, at least when the server is responding well.  I still have work to do in this area, but I was comfortable enough with the current state to launch the design publicly.

Since I was redesigning anyway, I did some sprucing up of various subpages.  Most notable are the Toolbox and Writing pages, which use a number of techniques to improve organization and appearance.  I still think the top part of the Writing page could use some work, but it’s leagues better than it used to be.  The one major page I’d like to further upgrade is CSS Work, but I’m still looking for an approach that is distinct from the other pages, yet thematically consistent.  If I can’t find one, I’ll probably take the same general approach I did for Toolbox.  I also rewrote some of the microcopy, such as the metadata (publication date, categories, etc.) at the bottom of blog posts, to be more evocative of the feel I was going for.

Late in the process, I got a welcome assist from Jesse Gardner, who had seen a preview of article design.  He had the idea to make a traced SVG version of the “Hand Made With Love” necklace charm from the masthead of the previous design, and then he just up and did it and sent me the file.  You’ll find it in the footer of the site.  It isn’t interactive, although it may in the future.  I haven’t decided yet.

I really hope you enjoy the new look.  It’s the first design I’ve done that wasn’t cribbed off someone else’s site in, oh, 15-20 years, give or take, and I’m rather proud of it.  It won’t win any awards, but it makes the statement I want it to make, and visiting my own site gives me a little glow of satisfaction.  I don’t know if I could ask for more than that.

• Hamonshu was published on Monday, April 13th, 2020.
• It was assigned to the Design, Projects, and Redesign categories.
• There have been ten replies.

I’ve been working from home for (checks watch) almost 19 years now, and I’d love to share some tips with you all on how to make it work for you.

Except I can’t, because this has been incredibly disruptive for me.  See, my home is usually otherwise empty during the day — spouse at work, kids at school — which means I can crank up the beats and swear to my heart’s content at my code typos.  Now, not only do I have to wear headphones and monitor my language when I work, I also am surrounded by office-mates who basically play video games and watch cat videos all day, except for those times when I really get focused on a task, when they magically sense it’s the perfect time to come ask me random questions that could have waited, derailing my focus and putting me back at square one.

Which, to most of you used to working in an office setting, I suppose might seem vaguely familiar.  I’m not used to it at all.

Here’s what I can tell you: if you’re having trouble focusing on work, or anything else, it’s not that you’re terrible at working from home or bad at your job.  It’s that you’re doing this in a set of circumstances completely unprecedented in our lifetimes.  It’s that you’re doing this while worried not only about keeping yourself and your loved ones safe from a global pandemic, but probably also worried about your continued employment — not because you’re doing badly, but because the economy is on the verge of freezing up completely.  No spending means no business income means no salaries means no money to spend.

We can hope for society-level measures to unjam the economic engine, debt leniency or zero-interest loans or Universal Basic Income or what have you, but until those measures exist and begin to work together, we’re all stumbling scared in a pitch-black forest.  Take it from someone who has been engulfed by overwhelming, frightening, pitiless circumstances before: Work can be a respite, but it’s hard to sustain that retreat.  It’s hard to motivate yourself to even think about work, let alone do a good job.

Be forgiving of yourself.  Give yourself time and space to process the fear, to work through it and you.  Find a place for yourself in relation to it, so that you can exist beside it without it always disrupting your thoughts.  That’s the only way I know to free up any mental resources to try to do good work.  It also puts you in a place where you can act with some semblance of reason, instead of purely from fear.

Stay safe, friends.  We have a long, unknown road ahead.  Adjustment will be a long time in coming.  Support each other as much as you can.  Community is, in the end, the most resilient and replenishing force we have.

• Trying to Work From Home was published on Wednesday, March 18th, 2020.
• It was assigned to the Commentary and Work categories.
• There has been one reply.

Six years ago, we participated in our first St. Baldrick’s event.  Carolyn was preparing to shave her head to support Rebecca, who was still very much alive and, we thought, cancer-free.  And Joshua, the little brother at just over three years old, had apparently decided to do the same to his head, although he didn’t tell us until the day of the event.

This year, Joshua will be participating in St. Baldrick’s for the seventh time in a row, shaving his head to raise money for and awareness of the campaign to cure cancers in memory of his sister at the Cleveland Heights event on Sunday, March 15th.  He’s been letting his hair grow all year for maximum payoff: literally, he has not had a single hair cut since last year’s St. Baldrick’s event.  He also recently had Carolyn dye it blue, which means he’s giving off a strong JRPG vibe.  (He rolls his eyes whenever I mention this.)

This being his seventh year, Joshua will officially become a Knight of the Bald Table.  In his honor, I will be his squire for the day — which means I will be shaving my head as well, for the first time.

If you can, please support Joshua’s knighting shave by supporting his fundraising efforts.  He’s set an ambitious goal, but I’m pretty sure that working together, we can well exceed it.  You can do it in honor of him, or in honor of his sister, or both; but please, if you can give him a boost, please do so.  Any amount will help, as will spreading the word on les médias sociaux.  Thank you.

• Sir Joshua Meyer was published on Thursday, March 5th, 2020.
• It was assigned to the Joshua category.
• There have been no replies.